Last month a site of shame, shared by
Saddam Hussein and George W Bush, was emptied.

Abu Ghraib prison is the place where
Saddam's functionaries tortured (and sometimes
killed) many enemies of his regime, and where
Bush's functionaries, as a series of notorious
digital photos revealed, committed what the US
press still likes to refer to as "prisoner abuse".
Now, there are no prisoners to abuse and the
prison itself is to be turned over to the Iraqi
government, perhaps to become a museum, perhaps to
remain a jail for another regime

whose handling of
prisoners is grim indeed. The emptying was
clearly meant as a redemptive
moment or, as Nancy A Youssef of the McClatchy
Newspapers put it, "a milestone" for the huge
structure. After all the bad media and the hit US
"prestige" took around the world, Abu Ghraib was
finally over.

Of course its prisoners, who
remained generally uncharged and without access to
Iraqi courts, weren't just released to the winds.
Quite the opposite: more than 3,000 of them were
redistributed to two other US prisons, Camp Bucca
in Iraq's south and Camp Cropper at the huge US
base adjoining Baghdad International Airport, once
dedicated to the holding of such "high-value"
detainees as Saddam Hussein and top officials of
his regime.

Camp Cropper itself turns out
to be an interesting story, but one with a
problem: while the emptying of Abu Ghraib made the
news everywhere, the filling of Camp Cropper made
no news at all. And yet it turns out that Camp
Cropper, which started out as a bunch of tents,
has now become a US$60 million "state-of-the-art"
prison. The upgrade, on the drawing boards since
2004, was just completed and hardly a word has
been written about it. We really have no idea what
it consists of or what it looks like, even though
it's in one of the few places in Iraq that an
American reporter could safely visit, being on a
vast US military base constructed, like the
prison, with taxpayer dollars.

Had anyone
paid the slightest attention - other than the
Pentagon, the Bush administration, and whatever
company or companies had the contract to construct
the facility - it would still have been taken for
granted that Camp Cropper wasn't the business of
ordinary Americans (or even their representatives
in Congress) - despite the fact that the $60
million, which made the camp "state of the art",
was surely Americans', no one in the United States
debated or discussed the upgrade and there was no
serious consideration of it in Congress before the
money was anted up, any more than Congress or the
American people are in any way involved in the
constant upgrading of US military bases in Iraq.

While Iraq and future Iraq policy are
constantly in the news, almost all the US
facts-on-the-ground in that country - of which
Camp Bucca is one - have come into being without
consultation with the American people or, in any
serious way, Congress (or testing in the courts).

Camp Bucca is a story you can't read
anywhere in the United States - and yet it may, in
a sense, be the most important American story in
Iraq right now. While arguments spin endlessly
here at home about the nature of withdrawal
"timetables", and who's cutting and running from
what, and how many troops the US will or won't
have in-country in 2007, 2008 or 2009, on the
ground a process continues that makes mockery of
the debate in Washington and in the country. While
the "reconstruction" of Iraq has come to look ever
more like the deconstruction of Iraq, the
construction of an ever more permanent-looking
American landscape in that country has proceeded
apace and with reasonable efficiency.

First we had those huge military bases
that officials were careful never to label
"permanent". (For a while, they were given the
charming name of "enduring camps" by the
Pentagon.) Just about no one in the mainstream
bothered to write about them for a couple of years
as quite literally billions of dollars were poured
into them and they morphed into the size of US
towns with their own bus routes, sports
facilities, Pizza Huts, Subways, Burger Kings, and
mini-golf courses. Huge as they now are, elaborate
as they now are, they are still continually being
upgraded. Now, it seems that on one of them we
have $60 million worth of the first "permanent US
prison" in Iraq. Meanwhile, in the heart of
Baghdad, the Bush administration is building
what's probably the largest, best-fortified
"embassy" in the solar system, with its own
elaborate apartment complexes and entertainment
facilities, meant for a staff of 3,500.

If, for a moment, Americans stop listening
to the arguments about, or even the news about,
Iraq here at home and just concentrate on the
ignored reality of those facts-on-the-ground,
you're likely to assess our world somewhat
differently. After all, those facts being made on
the ground - in essence policy-put-into-action
without the trappings of debate, democracy, media
coverage, or checks and balances of any sort - are
unlikely to be altered or halted in any
foreseeable future by debate or opinion polls in
the US. All that is likely to alter them is other
facts on the ground - a growing insurgency, the
deaths of Americans and Iraqis in ever greater
numbers, a region increasingly thrown into
turmoil, and maybe, one of these days, a
full-scale, in-the-streets reaction by the
Shi'ites of Iraq to the occupation of their
country by a foreign power intent on going nowhere
any time soon.

A Bermuda Triangle of
injusticeRecently, speaking of the Bush
administration's urge publicly to redefine and so
abrogate the Geneva Conventions, former secretary
of state Colin Powell said: "If you just look at
how we are perceived in the world and the kind of
criticism we have taken over Guantanamo, Abu
Ghraib and renditions, whether we believe it or
not, people are now starting to question whether
we're following our own high standards."

It's a comment not atypical of the present
debate in Washington and possibly of feelings in
the country. The media play up the courageous
stands of Republican Senators John McCain, Lindsay
Graham and John Warner in bringing us back to
those "high standards". In the process, the
details of how much of what we can use in
questioning whomever and what modest protections
prisoners might or might not receive in America's
offshore prison system are hashed out. But no
matter what is decided on any of these matters, in
the real, on-the-ground world, Americans' "high
standards" are quite beside the point - the point
being the globally outsourced penal system being
created.

For example, President Bush
recently announced that the United States was
emptying other prisons as well - previously
officially unacknowledged "secret prisons" around
the globe - of 14 "high value" al-Qaeda detainees.
"There are now no terrorists in the CIA program",
he said, though that is unlikely to be the actual
case.

Looked at another way, however, that
secret Central Intelligence Agency detention
system, which seems to consist of makeshift or
shared or borrowed facilities around the world,
sits in place, ever ready for use. It's not going
anywhere and in the most basic sense it probably
cannot be shut down. Nor, it seems, are the almost
14,000 prisoners the US holds in Iraq, the 500 (or
more) in Afghanistan, and the nearly 500 in
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, going anywhere. Even with
Abu Ghraib empty and the secret prison system
officially emptied, nearly 15,000 prisoners are
being held by the US in essence incommunicado,
most beyond the eyes of any system of justice,
beyond the reach of any judges or juries. In many
cases, as in that of Bilal Hussein, a Pulitzer
Prize-winning Iraqi photojournalist, who has been
held, probably at Camp Cropper, without charge or
trial "on suspicion of collaborating with
insurgents" for the past five months, even that
most basic right - to know exactly why you are
being held, what the charges are against you - is
lacking.

Whatever arguments may be going
on in Washington over which "tools" or
"interrogation techniques" the CIA is to be
allowed to use or over exactly how the 14 al-Qaeda
detainees just transferred to Guantanamo will be
tried, this set of facts-on-the-ground adds up to
America's own global Bermuda Triangle of Injustice
into which untold numbers of human beings can
simply disappear. The "crown jewel" of America's
mini-gulag is, of course, Guantanamo. And again,
whatever the fierce arguments in the US may be
about Guantanamo "methods" or what kinds of
commissions or tribunals (if any) may finally be
chosen for the run-of-the-mill prisoners there,
one fact-on-the-ground points us toward the actual
lay of the land. A little-publicized $30 million
maximum-security wing at Guantanamo is now being
completed by the US Navy, just as at the US prison
at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, there has
been an upgrade.

In all-too-real worlds
beyond our reach, everything tends toward
permanency. Whatever the discussion may be,
whatever issues may seem to be gripping Washington
or the nation, whatever you're watching on TV or
reading in the papers, elsewhere the continual
constructing, enlarging, expanding, entrenching of
a new global system of imprisonment, which bears
no relation to any system of imprisonment
Americans have previously imagined, continues
non-stop, unchecked and unbalanced by Congress or
the courts, unaffected by the Republic, but very
distinctly under the US flag.

Contractors and mercenaries And
don't imagine that this is an anomaly, applicable
only to imprisonment abroad. Almost anywhere you
look, the facts on the ground tell a story at odds
with what's important, what's real as we Americans
imagine it.

Let's take, for instance,
what's now referred to as the Intelligence
Community (IC), a collection of at least 16
agencies, ranging from the CIA and the National
Security Agency (NSA) to the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Consider then just
one recent piece about the IC by Greg Miller of
the Los Angeles Times, headlined "Spy agencies
outsourcing to fill key jobs".

As Miller
points out, the overall intelligence budget has
gone up about $10 billion a year in recent years
and for that we've got an upgrading (or at least
upsizing) of almost every one of those 16 agencies
plus a whole new, sprawling layer of intelligence
bureaucracy headed by John Negroponte, the
intelligence tsar, who runs the new Office of the
Director of National Intelligence (not even
included in the count above). Miller reports
another interesting fact-on-the-ground as well:
enormous numbers of private contractors are
flooding into the IC.

"At the National
Counterterrorism Center - the agency created two
years ago to prevent another attack like [that of]
September 11 [2001] - more than half of the
employees are not US government analysts or
terrorism experts. Instead, they are outside
contractors. At CIA headquarters in Langley,
Virginia, senior officials say it is routine for
career officers to look around the table during
meetings on secret operations and be surrounded by
so-called green-badgers - non-agency employees who
carry special-colored IDs."

At some
clandestine CIA overseas posts such as Islamabad
and Baghdad, Miller reports, private contractors
can make up as many as three-quarters of the
employees, while at home private contractors at
the CIA now also outnumber its estimated 17,500
employees. He concludes: "Senior US intelligence
officials said that the reliance on contractors
was so deep that agencies couldn't function
without them. ‘If you took away the contractor
support, they'd have to put yellow tape around the
building and close it down,' said a former senior
CIA official who was responsible for overseeing
contracts before leaving the agency earlier this
year."

The same could, of course, be said
of the US military, which is quite literally
incapable of existing today without its private
contractors such as Halliburton's KBR, nor could
its wars be carried on without the proliferation
of hired guns - mercenaries - who are now a given
in any such situation. This transformation of the
military into first an all-volunteer, then an
increasingly privatized as well as outsourced, and
now an increasingly mercenary institution is
another fact-on-the-ground, another building block
to America's future.

A reality built on
fear Around all such "facts", of course,
ever more entrenched and ever more expansive sets
of interests arise: companies to organize the
private contractees, or to deal with the
outsourcing, or to handle contracts and
construction work, not to speak of whole worlds of
consultants, specialists, and lobbyists.

This is a reality that no future US
administration, nor any better-empowered Congress,
would be likely to reverse, no less erase, any
time soon. No matter how the details of the
argument about NSA spying turn out, for example,
it's in essence a given that the National Security
Agency will continue to grow and make itself ever
more available in ever more ingenious ways,
trolling ever more extensively in communications
of every sort. These are the facts being
established on the ground, while in Washington
they argue over the (sometimes significant)
details and the media focus their main attention
on all of this as the essence of the news of the
day.

Take for example the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS), yet another sprawling,
ill-organized, inefficient bureaucracy established
after September 11 and not likely to do anything
but grow in our lifetimes. Around it has sprung
into existence an anti-terrorism homeland-security
industry (thank you, Osama bin Laden!) of
staggering proportions. "Seven years ago," writes
Paul Harris of The Guardian, "there were nine
companies with federal homeland-security
contracts. By 2003 it was 3,512. Now there are
33,890."

Think about that. They are there
to divide a terrorism/security pie that has, since
2000, resulted in about $130 billion in contracts
and now, according to USA Today, is a $59 billion
a year business globally - one based on that
surefire best-seller, fear, whose single major
customer is, of course, the DHS.

Not
surprisingly, around those 33,000 companies has
sprung up a whole network of Washington-based
lobbyists (including the lobbying firm of John
Ashcroft, the previous attorney general, the
Ashcroft Group), a plethora of security
conferences and trade magazines; in short, the
full panoply of a thriving business world. Already
at least 90 officials have left the Homeland
Security Department to become lobbyists or
consultants in the business that surrounds it,
including Tom Ridge, the first head of the
department. After only five years, the
homeland-security business, according to USA
Today, has already eclipsed "mature enterprises
like movie-making and the music industry in annual
revenue".

These are truly facts on the
ground, and no discussion in Washington of
homeland security is likely to shake them much. An
industry tracker, Homeland Security Research,
points the way to one possible future on which
Americans are never likely to vote. "A major
attack in the United States, Europe or Japan could
increase the global market in 2015 to $730
billion, more than a twelvefold increase."

Or consider the Pentagon's Northcom -
United States Northern Command, now responsible
for "the continental United States, Alaska,
Canada, Mexico and the surrounding water out to
approximately 500 nautical miles", including the
Gulf of Mexico and the Straits of Florida. Before
October 1, 2002, there was no Northern Command.
Less than four short years later, it's not only up
and running but has multiple missions. It's
preparing for the next hurricane (since we already
know the Federal Emergency Management Agency can't
do the job), deploying forces to battle wildfires
in the west, and getting ready for an avian-flu
pandemic. And don't think for a moment that where
an institution springs up (especially one with a
budget like the Pentagon's behind it), a world of
on-the-ground realities doesn't arise as well.
Just as it will when, in the near future, the
Pentagon redivides its imperial domains by
creating a new Africacom (United States Africa
Command), supposedly to "anchor US forces on the
African continent" - a decision that will be sold
around town based on "terrorism security threats",
but will in essence be about energy flows and oil
(see America's Africa
Corps, September 21). Each new
structure like this, each decision, will result in
new facts on the ground, new flows of money, and
new sets of private contractors.

These are
increasingly the crucial realities of our world -
and it's not the world of a republic. It's not a
world of checks and balances. It's not a world
where even a change of ownership in one or both
houses of the US Congress in November would prove
a determining factor. It's not a world where
people out there are just "starting to question
whether we're following our own high standards".
It's distinctly not the world as we Americans like
to imagine it, but it is the world we are,
regrettably enough, lost in. It's the world
created not just by a commander-in-chief
presidency, but by a Pentagon-in-chief-dominated
government, and by a corporation-in-chief style of
imperial rule.

It is a world striving for
permanence, which doesn't faintly mean that it's
permanent - not in Iraq and not here. But it might
be helpful if we began to register more fully not
just the latest flurry of whatever passes for
news, but the facts-on-the-ground that are, every
minute, every hour, every day, transforming our
lives and our planet.

Tom Engelhardt
is editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture. His
novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has
recently come out in paperback.